Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Search Results for: vietnam

Update on the Kidspire fundraiser!

· · Leave a Comment

About 10 days ago I posted a blog about my 12 year milestone at VMware. In the post, I asked for people in the VMware/Virtualization/Cloud community to consider sharing my request and/or consider donating even. VMware provided me the opportunity to donate ~3100 to a charity of choice. As mentioned, I added a personal donation and asked if people would consider contributing. I think it is fair to say it was a huge success. I would like to thank everyone for sharing my blog and tweets, and especially thank everyone who took the time to donate whatever they could. Whether it is 5 dollars or 500 dollars, every single contribution is much appreciated by the Kidspire team and myself.

So what was the result?

Yes, a total combined of 10k+ across the three efforts. (My grant and donation, Gofundme, Brightfunds.) This means that Kidspire can buy ~45 new Chromebooks for 3 orphanages, which is amazing. Again, thanks to everyone for contributing, it is much appreciated, and I will make sure to share some pictures when Kidspire visits Vietnam again to deliver the Chromebooks and sets up the new classrooms. If you haven’t gotten around to it, the fundraising campaigns are still open. I will close them at the end of the month, so there’s still time left to donate if you want. Thanks!

and that was 2014….

· ·

We are nearing the end of 2014 and the start of 2015 so I figured it was the time to look back at what I did in the past 12 months. I have a bunch of stats which may be of interest, but of course also on a more personal level 2014 was a hectic year so lets start with that.

In 2014 from a more personal point of view:

  • Joined the VMware Foundation on a life changing trip to Vietnam. 2 weeks in Vietnam helping the great (and inspiring) folks of Orphan Impact. I was happy that I was able to contribute in some way, and very happy with all the kind readers who decided to donate to Orphan Impact, it really does matter!
  • Was part of the product team that made VMware EVO:RAIL happen. What a journey… Had never been part of a product team, and seeing something growing from just an idea on a whiteboard to a full blown product and seeing it launched is a great experience
  • Was promoted to Chief Technologist. Very honoured and humbled. What an insane journey the last 7 years at VMware, starting in PSO as a senior consultant, who would have thought.
  • Joined the VMware Office of CTO. Long dream to join this team of super heroes.
  • Co-authored “Essential Virtual SAN”, published through VMware Press and went to China for a book signing with a crazy long queue of people waiting.

Needless to say, but 2014 was hectic and life changing in many ways for me. But what about the stats?

  • Published 143 new articles, bringing it to a total of 1810 posts (including this one)
  • My 5 top referrers:
  • Visitors came from 224 countries with the US leading by large (6x more than the UK and India)
  • I had 3 major contributors in terms of comments, thanks John Nicholson / Forbsy and James Hess!
  • My top visited page was the Virtual SAN page
  • My top article was the EVO:RAIL Introduction article, but all VSAN articles score extremely high
  • Visitor traffic grew with 20%

Also from a stats perspective 2014 was a great year. I am hoping 2015 will be even better, and I want to wish all of you a Happy New Year!

As he faced the sun he cast no shadow

· ·

Those who are wondering, the title is a quote from one of my favourite Oasis songs. This phrase to me talks about someone who goes through life unnoticed. This phrase is what I thought of when thinking about orphans and orphanages. I felt that the majority of them would go unnoticed, would have no opportunity, would not receive the love and/or affection they need. Reality unfortunately is that this is true in many cases.

While flying back from Vietnam, I took some time to think about my experience working with Orphan Impact and Team4Tech on behalf of the VMware Foundation. I guess it is fair to say that I did not expect what an impact something like providing computer classes can have on these orphans. As I mentioned in my previous blog post: Love / affection, appreciation, acknowledgement, a chance… this is what truly matters. This is ultimately what these kids get from the awesome team from Orphan Impact, yes they provide computer classes but the social aspects are far more important if you ask me.

Someone once said that helping out in these orphanages was short term thinking, would not make a difference in the long run, that the government has to change and give more to the unfortunate. Maybe he was right, at least to the point where the government should invest more. I don’t think however we should wait for that to happen by itself, it only happens when you raise awareness of the situation. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we changed the world by going on a 12 day trip to Vietnam. However, if these 12 days gave only one of those kids in the 4 orphanages we visited the feeling he or she matters ,and therefor has a better chance of surviving, than it was more than worth it!

In the end, we can not control someones journey, but we can do your best to help them navigate and give them the confidence needed to determine which direction they take.

Thanks VMware, Team4Tech and Orphan Impact for allowing me to be part of this great and eye opening experience.

Startup News Flash part 14

· ·

Part 13 of the Startup News Flash… Hopefully not an unlucky one for the startups featured. Just a short one considering I am in Vietnam and away ‘from work’ for the last 2 weeks.

A3Cube is a startup which came out of stealth recently and announced as they call it a ‘brain inspired’ data plane encapsulated in a NIC designed to bridge supercomputing benefits to the enterprise. The core of their solution is called Ronnie Express. They aim is to eliminate the I/O performance gap between CPU power and data access performance for HPC, Big Data and data center applications. A3CUBE’s In-Memory Network technology allows direct shared non-coherent global memory across the entire network, enabling global communication based on shared memory segments and direct load/store operations between the nodes. Basically a server “interconnect” solutions for lrge scale. They took the word “scale” serious by the way and can go up to 64,000 nodes. For more details, I highly recommend to read this excellent article by Enrico.

Infinio just announced Infinio Accelerator 1.2. This new version of the Infinio Accelerator now supports vSphere 5.5. Useful to know for those who have a home lab, Infinio is running a limited-time offer of free non-expiring licenses for test labs. Hit their website to find out more.

Support your fav. virtualization bloggers, vote for the top blogs!

· ·

I just woke up in an extremely warm Vietnam and noticed it is that time of the year again. I am hoping to end up somewhere at the top of the list again, but I realize like no one else that this is not a given. The competition is huge and some really stood out this year. There are three in particular that stood out in my opinion which for sure made my Top list: Cormac Hogan, William Lam and Derek Seaman. All three did something different than most bloggers do. They bring unique content, a unique perspective and showed dedication / perseverance. I am expecting all three to be in the top of the list for sure.

2013 was a crazy year… I joined a new team and am working on an exciting new product at VMware, which I unfortunately cannot talk about yet. We saw the beta release of Virtual SAN and that resulted in many many articles. I was fortunate enough to be selected to present at both VMworld EMEA and US, and presented at various VMUGs but the two which particularly stood out were Italy and Denmark as I had not been there before. The busiest blogging day of the year was August 27th with over 13k views.

I guess something exciting to mention is that I started working on a new book, of course somehow Eric Sloof managed to notice if first and scooped the news. Will take a while before it is released but the title will be: Essential Virtual SAN. The rough cuts should be online soon as well. Happy to be working with Cormac Hogan on this, I couldn’t think of anyone else who would be better fitted to write a book on the topic of VSAN with.

Something worth noting as well, the top referring sites: twitter, VMware VMTN Community, facebook, Eric Siebert’s VLP and blogs.vmware.com. In that order, and it makes you realize how important social media is today. Whether it is twitter or a community forum… it can drive a lot of traffic when used in the right way!

Thanks again to Eric Siebert who spends a MASSIVE amount of time going through the voting, filtering out discrepancies and making sure it all is done in a fair manner! Make sure to bookmark his website, add it to your RSS reader and follow him on twitter. So what are you waiting for, head on over and take the survey!